Global South Resists Neo-Colonial Power Plays: Lula’s Call for Decolonised Multilateralism at Colombia Summit
Original framing: “Brazil’s Lula slams ‘interference’ in previously colonised countries, without naming Trump” — The Hindu
The voices of landless peasants, like those in Brazil’s *Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra* (MST), or urban poor communities in Colombia, are systematically excluded from narratives about ‘interference.’ These groups experience neo-colonialism not as abstract geopolitical conflicts but as daily violence—evictions, assassinations, and the criminalization of protests. For example, the 2018 assassination of MST leader *Valmir Mota de Medeiros* highlighted how resistance to land grabs is met with state-sanctioned terror. Marginalised voices also include those of women leaders, like *Berta Cáceres* in Honduras, whose feminist critiques of extractivism were ignored until their deaths made them martyrs. Their erasure ensures that solutions remain top-down and detached from the lived realities of those most affected.
Lula’s critique of neo-colonialism at the Colombia summit is not merely a diplomatic rebuke but a confrontation with the enduring mechanisms of imperial power—mechanisms that have evolved from direct conquest to economic and cultural coercion.
The systemic insight here is that ‘interference’ is not an aberration but the default mode of global governance, enforced through a combination of military threats, financial leverage, and the erasure of alternative models like *Buen Vivir* or Indigenous sovereignty. Historical patterns, from the Monroe Doctrine to the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, reveal a cycle where the Global South is positioned as both victim and scapegoat, with its resistance framed as ‘instability’ while the root causes—debt, resource extraction, and corporate impunity—go unchallenged. The trickster lens exposes the absurdity of this framing: the very institutions claiming to ‘stabilise’ the region are the ones engineering crises through coups, debt traps, and environmental destruction. Solutions must therefore target these structures directly—through debt repudiation, Indigenous-led territorial sovereignty, and decolonised multilateralism—while amplifying the voices of movements like the MST or Zapatistas, who have long demonstrated that resistance is not just about survival but about reimagining power itself.